Story of a glowing bird
by Thalassina
Summary: Sometimes we just don't wanna be recognised. This is about my sister. Her name was Zoë. AU. (Originally not supposed to be a fanfiction so characters are very OOC.)


**See, I had this homework where I had 8 adverbs and 8 objects and had the option to write a story with these words. This is what came out of it.**

 **I asked my precious friend Smiles Burn In The Styx (go check her profile, she's wonderful) to have a look at it and after she did some editing we talked about the potential of this being a fanfiction. She made me realise that Zoë and Calypso are (half-)sisters (sorry, I'm serious, I didn't notice ever before...) and thus I decided making this an AU told from Calypso's POV.**

 **The characters are very OOC but hey, originally it wasn't supposed to be a fanfiction and it's an AU, so whatever.**

 **I hope you like it anyway and please tell me what you think :)**

 **Enjoy :3**

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 _"Looking up at the stars hoping there is something more..."_

 _\- Oak Island (Our Last Night)_

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Sometimes we just don't want to be recognised.

Whether it is because we have social anxiety, did something special (in a negative or positive way) or are related to a person fitting the latter – people do not care as long as it satisfies their interests.

And _this_ is definitely what they like to call interesting.

It's about my sister.

Her name was Zoë. Which is funny in a way since it means 'life'. She was seven years older than me but it sometimes felt like she was ages away.

I don't know what made her the way she was. Maybe it was our mother leaving or our dad always being on business trips letting us alone at home. Maybe it was the world itself that broke her. But maybe it was just her, although I believe she was born a jolly child. There are pictures and videos showing her dancing happily around the living room, driving her bike down the street for the first time without help, leaving the house on her first day to school and sitting on our dad's shoulders in a stadium watching a football game.

There aren't many pictures of us together because our mum took the camera with her when she left. I clearly remember that day.

When I woke up I heard voices shouting loudly at each other. That sound wasn't new to me since they used to fight a lot lately. But today I sensed something different in their words, something I couldn't place. How would I have, anyway? I was barely three years old.

I climbed out of my bed and slowly tiptoed into the hall, finding our parents raging and throwing things like a spoon and a plastic plate at each other as well as harsh words I wasn't able to understand yet at my tender age.

I recall standing there in shock, clinging onto a cloak that was hanging on the coat rack when a pen thrown by my mum almost hit me and neither of them noticed me.

It was Zoë who dragged me back into my room, shutting the door firmly.

"You don't need to see that," she told me.

"Why are they so angry again?" I whispered, afraid they could hear me and shout at me, too.

"Everything's gonna be okay," she assured me, ignoring my question.

I winced at the sound of breaking glass and my mum screaming hysterically and pressed my little hands on my ears but I was still able to hear them.

"Come on," Zoë said, grabbing my arm. "Let's get out of here and do something funny."

She quickly dressed me before carrying me in her arms to the back of the house, through the back door and our garden, around the house to the garage where she put me into the children's seat on the pannier rack of mum's bike. In no time we were gone.

We cycled through the park, fed the ducks at the pond, ate lots of ice cream and not once was I thinking about what was happening at home.

That was until we had to head back again and Zoë tried to cover up her worry by playing 'I spy with my little eye' with me. But even as a three-year-old I was able to perceive the tension in her voice.

When we entered the house our mum was nowhere to be found. From the kitchen we heard a strange muffled sound, like someone crying into a cloth. I wanted to peek but Zoë held me back, telling me to go to her room and play with her cuddly toys while she would check on the mysterious sound, making it sound like an adventure, and I obeyed.

About half an hour later she came back, her eyes red and filled with sadness and anger.

"Where's mum?" I asked her and she put on a smile.

"She's on a break." She sat down next to me and picked up a stuffed tiger.

"When will she come back?"

"Soon."

We played animal farm the whole evening. And mum didn't come back soon.

Instead, two years later we received an invitation to her wedding. I was confused, I thought she was married to dad.

"Sometimes a marriage doesn't work out," she explained to me, "and we find a person that fits into the place we call our heart better. I do love your dad and you and your sister. But still I have to marry George because I love him as well."

I didn't quite understand it but I told her I loved her, too.

Zoë didn't show up at all.

When I was six we wanted to go swimming in class. Zoë found me crying under the little willow tree in our garden.

"What's the matter, little glitter?" she asked and moved closer so she could nudge my shoulder with hers.

"In PE we have to go swimming but I cannot swim. My classmates will laugh about me and my teacher is going to be angry." I sniffed.

"Dad didn't teach you?" She frowned when I shook my head.

"Well, then," she announced, "go pack your swimsuit, we're going swimming."

And go swimming we did. Zoë was a great teacher. She was patient and careful and when I got frustrated because it didn't go as fast as I wanted she moved around in the water funnily, pretending to be a seal trying to balance a ball on her nose, making me laugh.

She was a good swimmer. The best I knew, in fact. When she was in the water she used to become a different person. She seemed somehow lighter, like the water didn't just make her body less heavy but also took away everything that bothered or pressured her, all the things she worried about. She could laugh with all her heart. And she could swim. I always thought she resembled a mermaid, beautiful with her long and thick dark hair, gliding through the water majestically.

But as soon as we were home she became serious again.

One evening when our dad had left after he'd just come home in the morning and was supposed to take us to the theme park next day I found her crying on the couch in front of the TV.

"Why are you crying?" I asked concerned. "You're sad, aren't you?"

Zoë managed a smile. "Yes."

I sat down next to her and studied her face. In the dim light I could see the tears streaming down her cheeks.

"Why are you sad?"

She wiped a sleeve over her eyes before hugging me tight.

"Because somebody on TV just died."

"Oh," I said, "can we watch a happy movie instead?"

"Sure."

While the movie was on we didn't leave the couch and she was not crying again.

Zoë could also be angry.

She got mad at our dad a lot as well as at mum (with George she didn't even speak a word). But when people were bullying me she could turn into a fury.

At the age of eight my friends (or rather so-called-friends) thought it'd be funny to steal my shirt after PE class. I actually still would have had two lessons after it but I was too ashamed to go and too afraid to tell a teacher so I went home, merely with a towel around my upper body.

Zoë was at home (afterwards I wondered why but she never told me and I never asked) and dad was not. She gave me a clean shirt and took me back to school where we waited for my friends to come out during break. Then she planted herself in front of them threateningly, took a deep breath and I was afraid she'd loose her temper in front of the teachers standing on the school yard every here and there. But she managed to keep her voice low, albeit threatening. I was able to see the remorse in their eyes. They never did anything bad to me again. My sister really scared them off.

"I will never let anything harm you," she told me that night.

Yet, she did by leaving me.

One rainy afternoon she was sitting on her bed staring out of the window.

When I came in she didn't react until I called her name. The second she looked at me I saw something in her eyes. It was like a storm, a dark storm with lightnings and thunder and destruction. But the destruction was inside. The next moment it was gone, yet still there, invisible behind a barricade.

"What were you looking at?"

She only hesitated a split second before answering. "A glowing bird."

"A glowing bird?" Now I was curious. There was no such thing as a glowing bird but it was Zoë who said it so I believed her.

"Yes. It was sitting on a tiny branch in the willow, waiting for a mate to fly by."

I climbed onto her lap.

"Why was it glowing?" I wanted to know.

"I don't know. What do you think?"

"Maybe it wanted to be found."

"That's a very good suggestion. Let's hope it will succeed."

We sat there for a while, talking about glowing birds.

I was just ten years old when I found out about her scars.

We were having breakfast when she accidentally spilled orange juice on her shirt and went to her room to get changed. She left her phone in the kitchen and when it started buzzing I grabbed it and ran after her.

She had just taken off her shirt so her bare arms were showing. At the sight of it I completely forgot about her phone.

Her arms were covered in scars. Some of them were horizontal and some were in shapes, like letters you carve in a tree.

"What is that?" I blurted out and pointed to the reddish lines. She quickly pulled over a new shirt but I had already seen what she was trying to hide.

"Zoë, where do these scars come from?"

"I walked through bushes that had thorns."

"You don't do that."

We tried to stare each other down, neither of us wanting to let go. Eventually, she gave in.

"Don't tell dad. Please."

"I won't. Just tell me why you do that."

"Do what?" She played dumb. But I knew she was smart.

"Get scars."

Zoë sighed and leaned against her wardrobe, arms crossed over her chest.

"You're too young to understand."

"Tell me, anyway."

I didn't think she'd tell me. Surprisingly, she did.

"It's covering the mental pain with physical pain. Even if the sharp part of the blade nothing but touches my skin it already feels good. It's a relief."

I must have looked puzzled because she took one look at my expression and sighed again.

"Told you you wouldn't understand."

"How can pain be a relief for pain?"

"Just forget about it."

"Don't get more scars," I pleaded.

"I won't," she said.

I believed her.

Zoë had just turned eighteen a few weeks ago when my dad found her. She was laying on her bed like she was sleeping, only that she was not.

Sometimes we just don't want to be recognised. I was eleven when I lost my sister. Some people were crying. Some were gossiping. Others wanted to talk with me about her. But I always turned them down. They may have known her. But they never knew who she was.

After the funeral I took a walk through the park. When I walked past the pond where we fed the ducks eight years ago on the day our mother left I started to cry.

A bird's chirping on a nearby tree caught my attention. The bird was jet black but as the sun set on the horizon the fiery light seemed to set its feathery ablaze. It looked like it was glowing.

Now I understand what the glowing bird meant to Zoë. She was the glowing bird. She'd wanted to be found. She'd wanted to be recognised.

But instead, she got lost.


End file.
